(a) Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to a computer-implemented system that creates visual project reports where sets of tasks and milestones appear along a time axis that can contain non-linear or discontinuous timespans.
(b) Discussion of Prior Art
Project management is as much about communication as it is execution, but projects by their very nature are complex, which makes it difficult to effectively communicate the big picture to stakeholders or executives.
Commercially-available project management software such as MICROSOFT® Project or ORACLE® PRIMAVERA® P6® focus on the management of project details, but do a rudimentary job of creating visual reports that are concise and are easy for laypeople to understand. One of the reasons that project details are often difficult to understand is the fact that traditional project reports have a linear time axis and show all elapsed time between when a project begins and when it ends. In many cases, people's understanding can be improved by zooming in on a particular subset of time between a project's overall Start and Finish Times. For example, in a project that spans 2017-2020, it may be more efficient to enlarge the 2017 portion of the report relative to 2018-2020, thereby focusing people's attention on the near-term project deliverables.
On a related note, people's understanding can also be improved by completely eliminating sections of time from the time axis that are not relevant to the overall execution of the project. For example, project work usually does not take place on weekends, so eliminating non-working weekends from a project report will allow people to focus their attention on the scheduled working time that remains visible in the project report.
The concept of a time axis that is non-linear or discontinuous has addressed similar problems in other fields such as document management (U.S. Pat. No. 8,812,123), collaborative storytelling (U.S. Pat. No. 8,566,348), and temporal-spatial visualization (U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,966,398, 7,688,322).
Non-linear and discontinuous time axes have never been applied by a project management software application in a rules-based or a drag-and-drop manner. As a result, creating project reports on anything other than a continuous, linear time axis has been a largely manual, non-standard, and inflexible process.